Just News 4.17.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Four takeaways from the triple-union, LAUSD agreements averting a strike

Mallika Seshadri and Betty Márquez Rosales, EdSource

With contract negotiations between the Los Angeles School District and three unions coming down to the wire, the district’s 400,000 students and their families didn’t know when they went to sleep Monday night whether there would be school Tuesday morning. In the end, school is open this week after the district and unions averted what would have been a historic joint labor strike Tuesday morning. District negotiators reached agreements with three labor partners over a 48-hour period. And the tentative contracts were celebrated at a joint press conference with labor and district leaders talking about unity after months of negotiations. What are the takeaways from the averted 3-union strike? 

40,000 UC workers threaten statewide strike across hospitals, campuses, dining halls

Jaweed Kaleem, Los Angeles Times

A union representing more than 40,000 workers across the University of California campuses and medical centers announced Wednesday that it would launch an open-ended strike next month unless its contract demands are met, opening up the possibility of postponed medical procedures, limited cleaning at hospitals and campuses and reductions in undergraduate dining services. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3299 (AFSCME) union’s membership covers essential workers including custodians, food service staff in campus dining halls and hospital cafeterias, gardeners, and skilled craft workers including plumbers and electricians. In hospitals, the employees serve as patient care workers such as radiology technologists, nurse’s aides and patient transporters.

Moms for Liberty wanted a seat on the school board. Trump gave them a voice in the White House

Collin Binkley, AP News

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order against transgender athletes last year, he took a moment to thank Tina Descovich, co-founder and CEO of Moms for Liberty. Descovich was back at the White House a few months later, seated alongside CEOs of Google and IBM to weigh in on artificial intelligence and education policy. Last month, when first lady Melania Trump hosted a global technology summit in Washington, Descovich was there, too. Her presence at the White House underscores the meteoric rise of a group that made its name in local politics, fighting to win school board seats and end “wokeness” in U.S. schools. What started as a fringe of far-right mothers has seen its interests collide with a presidential administration that embraces and amplifies their message, launching the group into a new level of influence in public policy.

Language, Culture, and Power

Education Department dissolving federal office serving English learners

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

The Education Department plans to dissolve the office that supports the country’s 5 million English learners. The move comes as the Trump administration has called to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and to stop funding English language acquisition programs in the federal budget. The country’s English learner student population includes U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents as well as authorized and undocumented immigrant children, communities that are reeling from the effects of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The Office of English Language Acquisition already was decimated in early rounds of layoffs. Last August, the Department quietly rescinded guidance that many states and school districts rely on to protect the rights of immigrant students.

States change custody laws to keep children of detained immigrants out of foster care

The 19th

As immigration authorities carry out what President Donald Trump has promised will be the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, several states are passing laws to keep children out of foster care when their detained parents have no family or friends available to take temporary custody of them. The federal government doesn’t track how many children have entered foster care because of immigration enforcement actions, leaving it unclear how often it happens. In Oregon, as of February two children had been placed in foster care after being separated from their parents in immigration detention cases, according to Jake Sunderland, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services. “Before fall 2025, this simply had never happened before,” Sunderland said.

Black Teacher: Black School: White CMO: Neoliberal Multiculturalism in a No-Excuses Charter Management Organization

Matthew S. McCluskey and Wajiha Saqib, Teachers College Record

Although the extant critical literature suggests that no-excuses charter schools and charter management organizations (CMOs) embody neoliberal and racist logics, recent staffing data suggests that they have diversified their teaching force considerably over the last decade. Indeed, national staffing data indicates that charters and CMOs now employ more Black teachers than traditional public schools. This study aims to understand this tension between the critical literature and the school staffing literature. Grounded in neoliberal multiculturalism theory, this study seeks to explore the experience of Black teachers in a space that embodies neoliberalism and, simultaneously, ostensibly becomes more multicultural. Specifically, this qualitative case study of the Black teacher experience in a no-excuses CMO asks: What are the primary reasons Black teachers joined their CMO-based school, and how do Black teachers describe their experience at their CMO-based school?

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Lessons for Earth Day

Zinn Education Project

On the first day of spring this year, March 20, Yuma, Arizona, recorded the hottest March temperature in U.S. history: 112 degrees. There is much to say about how frightening this is and what the implications are. But one thing to emphasize is the urgency of engaging our students in a climate justice curriculum. Climate justice, not merely climate literacy. We need to help students search for the causes of the crisis — and uncover its long history. Students can learn to think systemically and to recognize that the climate catastrophe is not the product simply of bad policies, but has its roots in a system that prizes profit above humanity and nature. Inequality is at the heart of this crisis — with the worst consequences falling on those who had the least to do with causing it.

Mom, Kids, and Nowhere to Go

Casey Quinlan, The American Prospect

Families are one of the fastest-growing segments of the homeless population, but they are rarely acknowledged in the larger policy conversation about homelessness in the U.S. Instead of living on the street, they’re often out of sight, staying with other family members or living in their cars. People don’t truly notice them the way they see chronically homeless individuals living on the street, people who work with homeless families say. “You often see the chronic street homeless who suffer from mental illness because it is more in your face … [Families] end up doubled up in situations and we just don’t end up counting them as homeless,” said Peter Jacob, executive director of Family Promise Union County in New Jersey.

Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?

Thomas Edsall, New York Times

As I was gathering material on the absence of young people at anti-Trump demonstrations, I came across evidence of powerful technological forces weakening persistence and cognitive tenacity across the board. Most interesting, the most immediate danger posed by artificial intelligence may not be the futuristic moment when A.I. becomes so smart and so independent of human control — in other words, conscious — that it takes over politics, economics and the social order. Instead, it may be the current power of A.I. to undermine persistence, curiosity and personal effort, encouraging in their place growing passivity and indifference, that poses the more proximate threat.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

The Trump Administration’s Changes to the Child Care and Development Fund Would Strip Families of Thousands of Dollars in Potential Child Care Savings

Hailey Gibbs and Casey Peeks, Center for American Progress

According to Center for American Progress analysis, families in 10 states could save between $440 and $15,000 per year on child care costs, but a recent regulatory proposal from the Trump administration would put those savings out of reach. In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a notice entitled “Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund” that, if enacted as written, would rescind a 2024 rule capping child care copayments for low-income families at 7 percent of household income—the federally recognized affordability benchmark. HHS did not propose an alternative affordability standard to reduce child care costs for working families, meaning families would be left with no path toward relief.

New Rules for College Admissions [Audio]

Scholars Strategy Network’s No Jargon

By now, most students who applied to college for the fall semester have received their decisions, bringing a mix of emotions, from excitement and relief to disappointment and uncertainty. For many, especially those turned away from top-choice schools, the admissions process can feel arbitrary and even unfair. Professor Julie Park breaks down what’s changed for college applicants since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision restricting race-conscious admissions. She also explores the uneven return of standardized testing and how policy shifts are reshaping who gets into selective colleges and what schools can still do to make the process more fair. For more on this topic: Check out Park’s new book, Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era Read her op-ed in The Hechinger Report, There’s a ‘cascade effect’ from the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban, and it’s hurting Black and Latino students Read her essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Economic Diversity Is Ticking Up at Elite Colleges. Why?

‘More Perfect University’: A Progressive Alternative to Turning Point USA on College Campuses

Julia Conley, Common Dreams

Gen Z’s rightward shift in the 2024 election and the influence of Turning Point USA, the right-wing college organization co-founded by assassinated activist Charlie Kirk, have garnered considerable attention in the press—but a new project launched Wednesday by the labor-focused media group More Perfect Union makes the case that young voters across the country want an opportunity to strengthen “our collective power as the 99%.” While Turning Point USA has cast itself as an antidote to liberal viewpoints and “wokeness” on college campuses, Elise Joshi, who is leading the More Perfect University initiative, emphasized in The New York Times that Turning Point has demonstrated a steadfast “refusal to champion working-class issues.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Public Education, Racial Inequality and the Struggle for Democracy: an Interview With Jonathan Kozol

Claire Kelley, Counter Punch

The following is a Q&A discussion about Jonathan Kozol’s new book, We Shall Not Bow Down Children of Color Under Siege: An Invocation to Resistance, published by Seven Stories Press.

Mobility Justice: What It Is and Why It Matters More Than Ever Right Now

NEPC Newsletter

A few years ago in a Connecticut suburb, a low-income mom’s car broke down. On paper, it probably looked like it wouldn’t impact her children’s ability to get to school because they participated in a choice program that—unlike many of its counterparts in other areas—offered transportation. But the path forward was not smooth. As is generally the case with public schools, the school district’s transportation budget was limited. To accommodate the complex web of students crisscrossing the metro area, the program’s buses picked up and dropped off students at a limited set of stops. The typical suburban participant had to walk roughly half an hour to reach a stop. Further, these walks often required crossing busy roads, traversing areas without sidewalks, or passing isolated or high-crime spots.

FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls 

18th Street Art Center

FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, a project by the Southern California-based Dancing Through Prison Walls community. The result of years-long collaboration with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists across the U.S. and beyond, FREEDOM TIME brings forward a living archive of written dances created in confinement—gestures of memory, imagination, resistance, and love that defy the logic of cages.

The Hearth will be transformed into a dance studio, abolition library, rehearsal space, an ongoing archive of community input, a bulletin board of handwritten dances by incarcerated collaborators, a film nook, and an archival altar of objects created by those inside. Visitors are invited to witness rehearsals, read incarcerated collaborators’ choreography, drink Freedom Time tea created by Zindagi Apothecary, and join in collective study and dreaming. Regular public events—performances, community conversations, dance jams, letter-writing gatherings to incarcerated political prisoners and people detained throughout the US by ICE, will unfold across the four-week installation.

Democracy and the Public Interest

When schools ban politics, what are students really learning?

Joel Westheimer, The Globe and Mail

Ontario’s Education Minister Paul Calandra wants politics kept out of graduation ceremonies. He has directed school boards to ensure that no speeches include references to “contentious issues of any kind.” But this is not simply about banning politics. It’s about redefining citizenship as apolitical–and that is fundamentally undemocratic. Similar dynamics are visible elsewhere in Canada, from Alberta’s recent Bill 25 that bars “political, social, or ideological matters” from schools to a British Columbia school board’s decision to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and In the Heat of the Night.

Across North America, schools and universities are increasingly trying to erase political expression. The impulse may be understandable. Public institutions are under pressure to avoid conflict, maintain broad appeal, and steer clear of reputational risk. But the result is a version of civic life scrubbed of disagreement, dissent, and public voice. Citizenship without politics isn’t neutrality– it’s obedience.

Women’s Experiences Dominated Book Bans Last Year

Marium Zahra, The Progressive

During the 2024-2025 school year, PEN America documented 6,870 book bans across eighty-seven public K-12 school districts in twenty-seven U.S. states. This is actually a decrease from the 2023-2024 school cycle, during which there were 10,046 individual book bans in U.S. public schools. In 2025, the Department of Education issued a dismissal of several book bans’ legal complaints on censorship grounds while at the same time limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that foster acceptance in classrooms. For Texas students, the recent Senate Bill 13, which went into effect last September, limits “indecent” and “profane” material in public school classrooms. Educators have argued that the bill’s phrasing could be interpreted arbitrarily by administrators and parents, allowing any title to be banned. Since 2025, teachers across the Lone Star State have been forced to either clear their shelves or openly challenge school administrators and face being fired. And Texas isn’t the only Republican-led state where teachers have feared reprisal as a result of book bans: In Florida alone, more than 2,300 titles were targeted in public school classrooms during the past school year.

Newark gave 16-and 17-year-olds the right to vote two years ago. They are still learning their power.

Jessie Gómez, Chalkbeat

Judah Ancion, a 16-year-old junior at Essex County’s Donald M. Payne School of Technology, found out he could vote in Newark’s school board election from a teacher’s offhand comment last month — only a few weeks before the April 21 election. Over the weekend, Denisha Kotey, a 19-year-old freshman at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, just learned that there’s even a school board election happening in her city. Their realizations come two years after Newark’s 16- and 17-year-olds got the right to vote in school board elections, becoming the first city in the state to do so. That historic move prompted former Gov. Phil Murphy, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, an award-winning rapper, and other elected officials to rally students at the city’s School of Data Science and Information Technology to pitch youth voting as a model for the rest of the state.

Other News of Note

The Enduring Lessons of the Jewish Bund

Ishan Desai-Geller, The Nation

Early in Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple’s history of the Jewish Labor Bund—a staunchly anti-Zionist, socialist movement founded by Eastern European Jews in 1897—she describes in harrowing detail the waves of anti-Semitic pogroms that tore through the Pale of Settlement. During a brutal convulsion of violence in January 1905 in Odessa in which pogromists murdered hundreds of Jews, Bundists reported to comrades abroad that “pogroms exist only where the government wants them.” Drawing an apt comparison to the racialized terror of police-backed lynchings in the American South, Crabapple writes that Bundists, and the Jewish community at large, faced insurmountable odds precisely because “both police and soldiers helped their attackers.” Today, in the name of Zionism, the descendants of those ravaged by pogroms and genocide subject Palestinians to the same crimes.